Interesting Article
Stowe gets a needed lift
By Gene Sloan, USA TODAY
STOWE, Vt. — Rod Kessler doesn’t mince words when he talks about the old chairlift to the summit of Spruce Peak.
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Small-town Vermont: The Stowe Community Center looks peaceful under a mantle of snow, which typically blankets the village from Nov. through April. | |
| Gene J. Puskar, AP | |||
“It was a tough ride,” says the head of operations for Stowe Mountain Resort, recalling the infamously frigid crosswinds that would buffet skiers on the 13-minute trip to the top.
Like so much else in this aging grande dame of New England resort towns, once known as the Ski Capital of the East, the slow-moving Big Spruce lift hadn’t gotten an overhaul since the area’s heyday in the ’50s. It wasn’t just old; it was a relic.
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SKIING STOWE | |
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Vertical drop: 2,360 feetBut now, as Kessler eagerly points out in a midday ski tour, things finally are beginning to change — and change big — both on and off the mountain.
Big Spruce is gone, replaced this year by a new high-speed lift that reaches the summit in under 6 minutes. And that’s just a small piece of a $300 million, 10-year extreme makeover of the ski area now underway that developers hope will catapult Stowe back to the top spot among Eastern resorts.
“There’s not a resort in the world that we will not compete with,” boasts hotelier James Horsman, the Ritz-Carlton veteran tapped to run a new ski-in, ski-out luxury hotel and spa that will form the cornerstone of a posh new pedestrian village. It’s designed to lure vacationers from across the USA and even Europe.
The 170-room property, now under construction at the base of Spruce Peak, won’t open until next year. But already, the first elements of the new base area — luxury ski-in, ski-out cabins — are beginning to bustle with well-heeled skiers.
And there have been significant changes on the mountain over the past year, including vastly improved lifts, reconfigured trails and the addition of the East’s first fully automated snowmaking system.
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| At Stoweflake: The resort’s Aqua Solarium features a 12-foot massaging waterfall. | |
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“It’s already made a big difference in the experience,” says Stephen Gilmore, 54, of nearby Williamstown, Vt., a regular at the ski area who pauses to talk while pulling on his ski boots in The Den, the mountain’s historic base lodge.
Gazing outside at the mountain, where light flurries have begun to fall, Gilmore, a local carpenter, says Stowe always has been one of the best in the East for skiing. But the wind-exposed, slow-moving lifts could make the trip to the top unpleasant. “It’s definitely nice not to be up in the cold so long,” he says.
The new lodging under development is on a scale of luxury rarely seen at East Coast resorts. The new four-bedroom luxury cabins, which are available to weekend renters, are selling for more than $2 million a piece. The largest penthouse condominiums are going for $6 million.
“We benchmarked to places like Deer Valley (in Utah) and Beaver Creek (in Colorado),” says project manager David Norden, ticking off the West’s premier ski getaways during a tour of the construction site. “People today want quality, services and amenities, and that somehow left the equation in the East a long time ago.”
Indeed, in recent decades, East Coast ski areas mostly have catered to day-trippers and a quick weekend getaway crowd. If you wanted a more involved “destination” ski experience, you went out West.
But that doesn’t have to be the case, says Norden. Stowe’s original trails, carved onto 4,395-foot Mount Mansfield — Vermont’s tallest peak — in the 1930s, may not be quite as grand as what’s available in Colorado and Utah. But the area has something you can’t get out West, says Norden: its quaint, New England setting, complete with the steepled village of Stowe 7 miles down the road.
Tucked into a reliably snowy corner of the Green Mountains not far from Vermont’s border with Canada, Stowe has a storied history. Originally a sheep farming and logging town, it has been drawing tourists for more than a century and was one of the nation’s first great ski areas. (A ski lift built in 1940 was for a time the longest in the USA.)
Even today, Mount Mansfield’s famously steep and narrow “Front Four” trails remain the pre-eminent challenge in Eastern skiing. Still, locals say there’s no denying that after a golden age in the 1950s and 1960s that saw everyone from the Kennedys to the Dalai Lama on its slopes, Stowe’s star began to fade as massive Western resorts such as Colorado’s Vail began to open.
The ski area was slow to add snowmaking, a selling point for newer Eastern rivals such as nearby Killington, and it has long lacked the kind of polished base-lodge facilities that skiers now expect.
“It was time for an upgrade,” says Neil van Dyke, owner of the Golden Eagle Resort, one of the many motel-like, family-run inns and eateries that line the winding Mountain Road up to the ski area.
Talking over coffee at the resort’s casual Colonial Café, where fleece-clad skiers are scarfing a quick breakfast before heading up the mountain, van Dyke says there’s been plenty of worry about the impact of $300 million of development on the town’s character. But this being Vermont, a bastion of the slow-and-careful growth movement, there also was plenty of debate, and eventually the area’s 4,300 residents and ski area officials came to a consensus.
“There was a lot of community involvement, and (the developers) were very inclusive,” he says of the process, which has taken years.
Despite more than a century as a tourist mecca, Stowe has clung fiercely to its small-town Vermont ways. There’s still not a single stoplight in the area, and, almost unheard of among resort towns, there’s not a single chain — no Best Western, no Starbucks. (Yes, a McDonalds opened a few years back, but it quickly was run out of town.)
Stowe’s small Main Street — all three blocks of it — still oozes that quintessential New England charm that has lured visitors here from across the country for generations, with clapboard houses and cozy stores selling handmade crafts, quilts and furniture.
“We’ve maintained that small community feeling, and I think that’s why people come here,” says Diane McCarthy, 56, a longtime resident and owner of one of the town’s breakfast hotspots.
Taking a break from the morning rush at her eponymous McCarthy’s, where she’s been dishing homemade waffles to tourists since 1974, the Massachusetts transplant says she doesn’t think the development will change that sense of community that first lured her.
Across the street, Chris Francis, owner of the 30-room Ye Olde England Inn, agrees, although he worries about a shortage of workers and housing as the ski area begins hiring hundreds of new employees.
“We already struggle to find people to work here,” says Francis, an Englishman who fell in love with the town two decades ago while on vacation and bought the inn on a whim. “Where are (the workers) going to come from? And where are they going to live?”
Still, he says, “I don’t think it’s a large enough development to swamp the community, and that’s the big fear.” If anything, “it’s a wake-up call that maybe we need to make some improvements.”
Indeed, Stowe’s mostly mom-and-pop, locally owned inns generally lack the sort of fresh, contemporary style that is increasingly the norm in resorts from Boston to Bali. Many of the rooms in town could best be described as grandmotherly in décor, albeit run by the friendliest of staffs.
Still, the area’s two biggest lodges, the Topnotch Resort and Stoweflake Mountain Resort, already are going through major overhauls — in part as a response to the ski area’s development plans.
Topnotch just finished refreshing all of its rooms and is building two elaborate new outdoor pools to open by June. Stoweflake recently added a $10 million spa with 30 treatment rooms.
“It’s where we wanted to go anyways,” says Stoweflake president Chuck Baraw, during a tour of the sprawling complex, which includes a co-ed lounging area with a Hungarian-mineral-salt soaking pool.
But after seeing what the ski area was doing, he says, “I ended up building it twice the size I originally planned.”
E-mail gsloan@usatoday.com